Omnichannel Retail: Why Is It Important For Brands

The conventional method of retail where retailers own only offline stores solely focused on one channel based on a single-distribution system. No doubt, this was the first and most successful method of selling products and customer retention too.

Moreover, this single-channel model helped providers to dominate the market and keep them under control. Still, the most dominant merchants also encountered limitations as the age of the digital emerged and offered more than one sales channel to sell products and services.

Single-channel strategy no longer remains impactful to captivate the customers and make them their loyal customers for life. These increasing offline web stores can satisfy the increasing and changing demands of the customers regardless of the channel they choose. The multi-channel approach became dominant, giving retailers and merchants the opportunity to scale and develop while meeting the needs of the customer.

The multi-channel business model of eCommerce came with a digital revolution allowing customers to purchase through any mode – offline or online. This model offered much more convenience and flexibility for consumers resulting in a sudden boost in sales.

Not just this, in the multi-channel eCommerce, customers received 24×7 access to their favorite brands and products thus, building brand loyalty. Furthermore, the retailers could analyze consumer behavior using this model and personalize their experiences for better shopping.

Transition From Multi-Channel to OmniChannel

Omnichannel is a step forward in the multichannel sales approach that is carefully designed to render a seamless shopping experience.

Multi-channel adoption also had some limitations regarding internal processes. Multi-channel lacked the necessary inventory visibility to siloed or multiple warehouses and efficiency in multi-warehouse management.

These challenges resulted in a supply-demand gap hence, a new strategy/model in the retail eCommerce market emerged – Omnichannel.

Omnichannel retail solution optimizes multiple sales channels bringing a high level of integration among them. Omnichannel acts as a centralized management system, which means the gap remains no more between the physical and online ones.

These blurred indifferences resulted in a seamless shopping experience where the customer can use multiple channels to begin and end their shopping hassle-free. Omnichannel leverages the customers to create a preferable shopping routine, which has become the major attraction for the 21st-century generation.

Omnichannel Retail: A New Way To Shopping Experience

Customers are already experiencing shopping through omnichannel as every customer has their preferred messaging channel. As per Statista, 1 among the 2 eCommerce decision-makers in North America and Europe consider omnichannel strategy as essential to integrate.

Even retailers such as BigCommerce, experienced 58% revenue growth when they added a marketplace to their single-channel eCommerce solution.

Forecasters also explain that omnichannel sales are expected to rise to 46% of all eCommerce sales by 2023 from 40.4% in 2019.

Omnichannel retail software lets brands reach customers at every touch point of their buying experience across multiple channels. Omnichannel is a holistic approach that goes beyond the sales channel, focusing that every customer has a unified in-store or off-store experience of shopping.

It was observed that the shoppers who use both online and offline methods of shopping have a 30% higher lifetime value than others. Additionally, Harvard Business Review also reported that 73% of the consumers use multiple channels during their entire shopping journey.

But only knowing about the omnichannel retail presence isn’t enough to bring revenue. Analyzing that, is your current eCommerce business flexible enough to welcome this new model? In order to reach customers on their preferred channel, you need to have a strong omnichannel strategy. Since, after the pandemic, around 80% of the customers switched to online shopping hence, not having an omnichannel strategy in place can put you behind the competition.

Now that digital Commerce has advanced, customers expect the brand to offer them an uninterrupted, smooth, and immersive shopping experience across all channels, including in-store, web, and app. Hence, the management of these customers on multiple platforms has become even more crucial yet challenging.

It was also observed that 86% of the buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

Why has Omnichannel Commerce Become Important for Retailers?

The classic truth of retail is that consumers will always want competitive prices, choices, and convenience. Along with internet and omnichannel strategy, brands can drive major progress on increased sales and profitability. In order to understand better how an omnichannel can make your brand value while providing convenience to the customers, here are some factors that can help.

Makes Shopping Journey Convenient

The grave pandemic could not stop consumers from engaging in online transactional activities however, it has been dispersed across multiple channels. Consumers also leverage social channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, & more, which opportunities the brands to add new features.

After the change in the shopping style, brands now must provide more convenience to the customers than ever before. By showing up where customers move to make their shopping journey, brands can cater more convenience.

As per the survey, 83% of shoppers indicated that convenience while shopping was more important to them than 5 years back. Omnichannel puts technology and operations in place to meet the customer’s ever-changing behavior and make logistics simpler.

Optimized Business With Data Analytics

The continuously changing behavior of the consumers, brands, or retailers needs to constantly change their sales and marketing channel mix to blend into the new reality. Understanding the data can help businesses to target their focus in the right place.

A controlled brand’s data stream gives you a better view of the marketing efforts on multiple platforms. Integrating data analytics in your eCommerce web design can help you analyze the reason behind customers’ decisions.

Optimizing data can help with consistent collaboration across channels while ensuring that mistakes aren’t made and information isn’t missed.

Personalization

Did you know that 75% of the customers like the idea of websites that curate as per their interests? Because customers want to feel that they are valued, providing a personalized experience can let them know the best.

Utilizing an omnichannel approach is the best way to deliver personalization. Omnichannel can help businesses collect data from multiple touchpoints and leverage that data to gain greater insights. These insights can further help tailor the messages and marketing strategy accordingly, which helps in curating experiences.

Set Yourself Apart From Others

With increasing digital competition for captivating and holding online attention, standing out becomes even more critical for the success of the brand. However, brands need to pivot with the omnichannel method in order to provide a better shopping experience and excellent service.

Brands that move to omnichannel retail can set themselves apart while providing the existing customer base a boost and opening up to a whole new market. With omnichannel, you can adapt to the changing needs and behaviors of the consumers, recalibrate the understanding, understand sales channels, advertising channels, and messaging better, and easy product assortment.

In order to integrate Omnichannel, we earlier shared how an effective and robust omnichannel strategy can help. Let’s talk about steps to build an omnichannel strategy.

Steps for Developing Omnichannel Strategy

Offering convenience for shopping across multiple channels with competitive prices is a part of business orchestration. Every business has its unique omnichannel strategy with a specific process to orchestrate because brands only choose those channels for marketing and product sales that best aligns with their objectives. Hence to create a robust omnichannel strategy that matches your unique needs, must follow these steps.

1. Segmentation of the customers based on geographic region, generation, online behavior, values, marketing campaign interactions, and much more.
2. Determining every customer segment based on their past and current channel usage.
3. The mapping of the customer journey to reveal insights into the customer’s thought processes.
4. Ensure that you can provide customer services cross-channel for consistent and quality support.
5. Integrate your technology to get a unified view in real-time of every piece of information.
6. Use automation, such as chatbots, set up behavioral triggers, use abandoned cart programs, and automate follow-up messages to deliver better control.
7. Test everything and test often.

In a Nutshell –

Today’s retailers fight with the changing needs and behaviors of the customers as multiple digital channels offer them more convenience to shop. Using an Omnichannel strategy helps you address the rising complexity while providing an excellent customer experience and managing operations costs.

With omnichannel marketing software, you can manage all activities on diverse channels in one place.

Your omnichannel strategy must include a holistic approach that helps your brand reach the customers through all modes – sales channels, marketing, and advertising while fulfilling their requirements.

Author’s Bio: Scarlett works with the editorial team of A3logics, a leading Ecommerce Web Development Company. Exploring the latest technologies, reading about them, and writing her views have always been her passion. She seeks new opportunities to express her opinions, explore technological advancements, and document the details. You can always find her enjoying books or articles about varied topics or jotting down her ideas in a notebook.